


A Brief Treatise On Computer Security

by kaberett



Series: Proserpine: Black Hat Hacker [1]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, The Mechanisms (Band), Ulysses Dies at Dawn (Album)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Dystopia, Gen, Immortals in Space, spacepunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 07:21:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaberett/pseuds/kaberett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even immortality is relative.</p><p>None of these kids, old as sin as they are, can remember a time without Hades. Their parents, older still, have already begun to forget: because even if you can halt the cell senescence, persuading the brain to store more data is a completely different matter - and a problem the Olympians hadn’t cracked.</p><p>Of course, we weren’t inclined to share, but I’m getting ahead of myself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carmilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmilla/gifts).



We are the Mechanisms, a band of immortal space pirates roaming through the universe on the starship Aurora. The crew consists of Gunpowder Tim, the master-at-arms; Ashes O'Reilly, the quartermaster; Drumbot Brian, the pilot; Baron Marius von Raum, ship's doctor; Raphaella la Cognizi, science officer; Ivy Alexandria, archivist and navigator; Nastya Rasputina, ship’s engineer; … the Toy Soldier; and myself, Jonny d'Ville, your Captain. _[First Mate! — Ivy]_

Today we’ll be weaving you a tale of warfare and weaponry — well, actually, it’s mostly about computer security, but that doesn’t alliterate as well, now, does it?

In any case, it features grenades. What, you didn’t know that explosives were named for pomegranates? Well, now you do.

Shall we begin…?


	2. Chapter 2

Even immortality is relative.

None of these kids, old as sin as they are, can remember a time without Hades. Their parents, older still, have already begun to forget: because even if you've worked out how to halt cell senescence, persuading the brain to store more data is a completely different matter - and a problem the Olympians hadn’t cracked. 

Of course, we weren’t inclined to share, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

See, Nastya doesn’t much care where we go, as long as she can stay with the ship. Ashes, though - Ashes has opinions. And _that’s_ how this guy, name of Prometheus, ends up hitching a lift: getting stranded in between stars happens more often than you might think, and every now and again we pick up a stray in the hopes of picking up a story to go with them, and — well.

By the time we came across him he’d been on the run long enough it had started to show. Didn’t even bother with a cover story — he was tired enough and desperate enough to tell us straight-out he’d got the tech to grant eternal life, and he’d give us a cut if we’d give him a ride. Anyone else — they’d have shoved the body out the airlock on the bet that they could find someone willing to buy even if they did have to do the legwork themselves. But us… well, Prometheus got lucky, didn’t he.

It wasn’t until later we found out who the ideological bastard had stolen it _from_ , and where he was after getting it _to_. Some backwater planet his own family owned — high-minded nonsense about overthrowing the oppressor. Nice thematic fit, really, with one of the idealists we’ll introduce you to later on in this particular tale. You know us: we were only in it for the happy-ever-after.

So he hands the coordinates over to Ashes, and then we don’t see him again til we’re pulling into orbit — probably the most sensible thing he ever did. When it comes to deciding who was going to do what - well, Nastya stays with the ship, like I said, but if you’d been paying attention then you’d know that, wouldn’t you. Me, I’m a people person; the Toy Soldier does its… thing — and Ashes? Well, if there’s one thing Ashes hates, it’s leaving jobs half-finished — so they declared they were going downside with Prometheus to see things through, though first they had to scrape him back out of the hold.

Doesn’t take long before the entire planet’s under attack, of course. We might have helped things along — what’s a breadcrumb trail and a little agitation between friends, I ask you? — but it was pretty much inevitable: Prometheus’ family work out what’s happened, and are they _pissed_. Next thing we know someone suspiciously familiar is heading up Labyrinth’s computing infrastructure and not returning calls. I'd tell you we were hurt, but I suspect you know us a touch better than that already.

Anyway, turns out that the way Ashes swung this gig is that Daedalus got a little distracted. If you’ve got a side business in the arms trade, a war on the horizon, and some new tech to play with… well, you might just be grateful enough to the person who delivered the goods to let them have some fun. Especially if the land-grab they’re making maps neatly onto territory you’d rather be clean of - because it’s all very well to _design_ complicated infrastructure, but there’s some logistical nightmares so tangled that even the most power-hungry don’t dare touch, and that can make them very difficult indeed to escape.

Oh, and Prometheus? Well, we never quite worked out why, but he’d got the impression that the new lot were better than the old. Course, by the time the Olympians had set up shop (with the Titans out of the way, it didn’t take long for the city Prometheus’d landed in to decide they wanted the rest of the planet) he’d been thoroughly disabused of the notion; rumour is he’s the only _embodied_ brain hooked up to the Acheron, spreadeagled and screaming, eyes staring into somewhere no-one else can see. I hear tell that a team of the finiest doctors in the City visits daily, to poke and to prod and to probe at the limits, and to bring the composition of his cerebral and spinal fluids in line with the calculated optimum for the computer's purposes. It's a lot of trouble to go to, just to make sure no-one else thinks of trying his game, but hey, it kept the medics off the street.

We're pretty sure Ashes was also behind Thanatos, the clean-up branch of the operation. Changed the name eventually, of course, to the Metropolitan Power Company — you got to move with the times — but that’s how the ferrymen started. Every one of the sorry low-paid sods was mortal, and every one of them was hated by everyone who couldn’t afford to ignore them. Their reputation wasn’t helped by the persistent rumblings that in slow weeks they weren’t above administering a hypnogogue and claiming death in order to make quota.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn they’re the group of workers with the highest volunteer rate for early entry to the Acheron, and the demographic with the highest rate of attempted suicide. You’d think they’d know better, but as it turns out, people are people everywhere, and mostly they’re just not very bright.


	3. Chapter 3

Around now I think it’s time we introduced you to another player in this game. Lady by the name of Demeter: before the war, she ran the biggest agrifertiliser business on the planet, so when immortality of a kind came on the market, she could afford it — and oh, but did she jump at the chance. The growth of the City — and of the Acheron — didn’t bother her a bit: automated plants in the distant dark still need raw material, and the culture medium for the Acheron has to come from _somewhere_. One deal with Hades later she was sitting pretty, with a steady stream of Thanatos’ leftovers into her warehouses for dispatch to processing.

Actually, let’s give you a little more detail on how the Acheron works. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll recall that there’s no processor more powerful than the human brain; and that keeping this wretched whittled-out planet running takes an awful lot of energy. You might also remember that people will do a very great deal to stay out of the Acheron, and that those as get rebrained by people desperate enough and rich enough come back wrong.

There’s reasons for that, and they include this: Ashes likes efficiency, and individual storage is anything but. No, optimisation favours the vats: no pissing about with piddling jars, just hook up some wires, slosh in the culture, add nutrients a couple of times a week, and add brains til full. Neurons that fire together wire together: grow-your-own glistening, gelatinous supercomputer.

Things didn’t start out that way, or so Ashes tells us: no matter how good you are, there’s going to be bugs you can’t quite squash in your first few rounds of prototyping. When Hades inherited the Acheron, everything was individual jars and temperature sensors, even for the scraps scraped up after accidents. Making the switch to batch processing… well, there’s infrastructure and start-up costs, and it never quite seemed worth the hassle until Proserpine started causing trouble. But after that — oh, after that it was vats for everyone, apart from a few exceptionally talented volunteers, and believe you me when I tell you the qualifying tests were _brutal_.

Now Proserpine was Demeter’s daughter, one and only, and of Zeus, from before he developed his taste for fucking with the lower classes. Even then, of course, he didn’t stick around, so Proserpine was brought up entirely by her mother, trained for the family business, and oh did she hate it: her dull grey mother and the dull grey corpses, and most of all the _fertiliser_. Demeter, you see, was much like the rest of the Olympians: trusted none of ‘em further than she could throw them, and certainly wasn’t willing to have anyone she wasn’t tied to by blood as her second-in-command. What Proserpine was _really_ after was unfettered access to the Acheron’s computing power… so she resented her mother’s simpering about trust and _keeping it in the family_ and _but you’re the only one, darling_ all the more for that her credentials only bought her limited time, limited power, because the Olympians… well, a resource like the Acheron, the only people who got to make full use of it were those as Daedalus owed favours to, from back in the day.

Ah, but access to the Acheron… we know that down _here_ you still rely on entering sigils by hand. Nothing that primitive for Daedalus: in a network made up of brains, the key — the identifier — is a secret thought. Of course, this doesn’t work so well if — like Demeter — you’re both uncreative and predictable, so it didn’t take long before a bored and belligerent Proserpine was running around bits of the Acheron she shouldn’t ever have been able to, and she even got away with it for a while.

We found out about all this when Nastya got around to passing on a message from the Toy Soldier. Seems these… _nymphs_ were all chattering away with each other, all the time — system they called Fama. But to find out Hades was spending a lot of time with the offspring of an Olympian… well, it was just a touch unexpected. Destruction and mayhem we’re used to, and even alliances of a sort, but rumours of _marriage_?

Turns out it things were a little bit more complicated than that.


	4. Chapter 4

Proserpine was young - at least by Olympian standards - brilliant, and very, very bored. Once she’d guessed her mother’s passphrase, it didn’t take long to hit the limits of what even Olympians were permitted to do - so she started to get creative. Working out how to bypass first-line security, the waking volunteer brains, didn’t stretch her much: disguise your activity patterns right and you could walk right in unnoticed. But after that… well, that’s when she came to Hecate’s attention.

Now Demeter did _not_ get on with Hecate, and it all boiled down to petty jealousy: Hecate headed up the division responsible for rebodyings, which meant she got the highest bidders and thus the pick of the cadavers, and if your mother spends long enough complaining about someone talented and dedicated and downright _glamorous_ , can you really blame Proserpine for having her interest piqued?

Ashes will tell you to this day that they never could quite work out whether Proserpine tripped the second-line security, the seeds, deliberately. See, a girl could get bored, just dealing with bodies, so Hecate’d also staked a major claim in the security sector. With her skillset and Ashes running the joint she’d ended up developing a warning system of her very own: anything that got past the perimeter of waking brains then had to avoid her home-brew pseudo-brains, which sent up very noticeable, very bloody explosions when triggered. Set off one, you’ll probably get away with it: they’re not very stable. Set off two near anything sensitive, you bring down the wrath of the gods.

But setting off four, in a very obvious pattern? That gets _attention_.

Demeter is off at a function far too important to risk taking Proserpine to when the Carians showed up on the doorstep. It’s Hecate who emerges from their midst, smiling wolfishly, and taking Proserpine’s arm took her entire into the carriage waiting in the passageway: big, black, drawn by mechanical horses, and powered by a sense of the dramatic.

Hades was waiting inside, of course. All they’ll tell us about that conversation is that it lasted hours and ended with the decision that summary execution would be too messy; instead they agreed to exchange passage off-planet for getting Proserpine out of their way. It took cashing in a favour with Zeus, but - so Ashes says - Hecate was very persuasive about the advantages to be gained in any subsequent political manoeuvering.

Fact is, it took Demeter a little while to notice anything amiss: she’d never been the most _attentive_ of parents. But when she did, oh, the City knew: Olympians might be back-stabbing traitors, the lot of them, but that doesn’t mean they enjoy it when it’s done to them; and when it’s your main competitor, your ex, and someone of decidedly dubious pedigree…

The long and the short of it is that Demeter stopped providing culture medium. Fine, shrugged Hades, and started the efficiency drive: between that and stockpiles, the place kept ticking over nicely for quite a while, give or take a little public outcry about brains growing together and dreaming together, no matter how whole or damaged they started. But while public outcry tends to die down after a decade or so, one can only, after all, economise so far, and wetware doesn’t take kindly to being taken offline and put in no-maintenance storage.

Eventually, Ashes tells us, Hecate volunteered to be the person to fetch the brat back, and there was no-one else interested - or at least, no-one powerful enough to take precedence. No need to examine motives too closely - most people wanted off-planet at least occasionally, and anyway it was a move guaranteed to get Demeter’s back up - but the rest of the Olympians had their hands full subduing the populace during the famine the denizens were not unfairly blaming them for.

The horse-trading on their return made the politics in bloody Camelot look like a picnic, though. Even down where I was I couldn’t avoid hearing about it, even if the Toy Soldier hadn’t insisted on sending disgustingly chirpy updates via the ship. Demeter wanted Proserpine back; Proserpine had gone and fallen in love with Hecate, in large part to spite her mother; Hecate, to her own surprise, had fallen in love back, or at least had enough respect for Proserpine’s understanding of the Acheron to want to keep her around. The agreement ended up being as Demeter would restore supply lines provided Proserpine lived with her; Proserpine, for her part, only acceded in exchange for a job with Hades and spending half the year off planet. Threatening to bring down the computing power behind the planet had made Demeter unpopular enough that when Proserpine turned out to spend most of her time downside at Hecate’s estate or the warrens Dionysus’ empire, there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it.

And as for what happened next…


	5. Epilogue

… well, we’ve told you all the interesting stuff already. Why’d Ashes agree to source grunts for a job that could bring down the Acheron they’d built up? Well, we’d been downside for a while, and we were starting to think about moving on. And that means it was time to shop for presents: Nastya sulks if we don’t bring her pretty things for the Aurora, and if Nastya sulks so does the fucking ship. But really, what it comes down to - never mind favours to Daedalus - is that Ashes thought it would probably turn out interesting.

Can’t say they were wrong…

'course, when we packed up, there was only one person with the background to take over running the planet-wide supercomputer (and she’d worked quite hard to keep it that way). Ashes sent 'em postcards for a while - never did understand it - and even something a little bigger and a little bit more vicious for the wedding, and wasn’t that a bugger to ship.

Which brings us to the end of this particular winding tale. Stick around and you might get another, but for now—

— go get drunk.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to my amazing betas; and - I had a lot of fun writing this, so I do so hope it does the trick for you.
> 
> The betas in question were sebastienne, who was fantastic about being sent endless plot outlines and snippets; frith, who rose magnificently to the challenge and whose advice I did not have brain to entirely take on board; and L, who cheerled excellently. Shout-out also to Chris, who responded with aplomb to an IM out of the blue to the tune of "er, so, how would _you_ hack the Acheron?"
> 
> Remaining infelicities are entirely my own. :-)


End file.
